Syrian military seizes village by Lebanese border

Sunday

Mar 9, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 9, 2014 at 2:56 PM

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Syrian-government forces seized a village in the central province of Homs yesterday, state media and a monitoring group said. The move is part of a push for control of areas along the Lebanese border.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian-government forces seized a village in the central province of Homs yesterday, state media and a monitoring group said. The move is part of a push for control of areas along the Lebanese border.

The village of al-Zara, west of the city of Homs, fell after “heavy clashes” between government and rebel forces, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, although the number of casualties was not immediately clear.

Al-Zara is inhabited mostly by Sunni Muslims from the ethnic-Turkmen minority, the group said.

In a statement on state news agency SANA, Syria’s armed forces said they had established complete control over the village and killed or captured a “large number of terrorists,” using state media’s customary term for rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar Assad.

The victory gave government forces control over a route connecting central Syria to the Mediterranean coast, one that had been used as “a primary route for terrorist groups coming from Lebanese territory to neighboring areas to carry out criminal operations,” the armed forces’ statement said.

Syria’s civil war has killed more than 140,000 people since it started three years ago as a peaceful protest movement against four decades of Assad-family rule.

The conflict has become increasingly tangled as rebel groups — including many hard-line Islamist factions — have turned on one another, leading to clashes that have killed thousands of people this year alone.

Separately, activists published a video online purportedly showing members of the al-Qaida splinter group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant executing eight prisoners. In the video, fighters in fatigues line up the prisoners in a building and force them to kneel before shooting them from behind.

It is not clear when or where the video was taken. Syrian state media also broadcast the footage.